


link the minutes of my days

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Series: you're finally here and I'm a mess [2]
Category: Elementary (TV), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Developing Relationship, F/M, Gen, Jaeger Pilots, Kaiju (Pacific Rim), Partnership, Past Drug Use, Psychological Trauma, Siblings, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2017-12-27 09:36:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the last days of the Kaiju War, former Ranger Joan Watson--one of the only people to survive the death of her co-pilot--is called back to the waning PPDC for one final attempt at closing the Breach and saving the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” by Murial Rukeyser (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245980), which I highly recommend reading.

When the Jaeger Program was in full swing and it looked as though there was an end in sight to the Kaiju War, _Vanity Fair_ had run a longform article about the pilots actively working to protect mankind. The Watson siblings appeared on a double-page spread overlaid with partial jump text that directed readers to finish the article on page 178 of the magazine. Joan wasn’t sure how many people actually read the whole article, or even all of the section dedicated to her and Oren and the Apis Stringer, but she still kept a copy of that photo. It was a good picture: black and white, Oren and Joan solidly in the foreground, the blurred shape of Apis Stinger towering abstractly behind them. Oren was grinning straight at the camera, and whoever edited the photo in post-processing had fixed his slightly crooked lower left incisor. As he so often did, Oren had one arm slung over Joan’s shoulders, and she, turned almost in full profile to look at him and the camera both, looked amused and a little serious. Joan knew for a fact that their mother bought a copy of the photo from the magazine and got it framed for the house.

That photo says a lot, even now, about how the media perceived Oren and Joan Watson. It helped, of course, that Oren was the spokesperson for their team, because he genuinely adored coming up with pithy sound bites, and also because Oren could smile and make a storm clear up. Their mother always said he should have been a diplomat, or a businessman. More practically, too, he could be counted on to have woken up all the way by the time he and Joan encountered the press; Joan always had to shuffle through the first few moments of her day, especially if it had started in the Conn-Pod. Oren joked that Joan needed about three alarms to wake up properly, whereas he needed only the lightest suggestion of something going on. 

“Well, you’re nosy,” Joan always said. (He was: even their father, before he's left, had always said that Oren was like a maiden auntie, keenly aware of gossip.) “I get where I need to, and someone has to look while you’re in the midst of leaping.” 

“I can leap headfirst into anything with you watching my back, Joanie,” Oren said, and he'd throw an arm around her shoulders so she’d be close enough for him to run his knuckles through her short hair. Joan permitted it, and the cameras loved it. The Watsons were photogenic and relatable, they piloted one of the most accurate Jaegers in the PPDC, and they were going to help save the world. Even their mother made for good press: the _Vanity Fair_ piece had run a sidebar about Mary Watson and her fierce pride in her children, her faith in the Jaeger Program. The writing wouldn’t have won a Pulitzer or anything, but even Joan—skeptical of roughly sixty percent of what the press had to say about the Jaeger Program in general and the Watsons in particular—had agreed that giving a face and name and voice to the terrified hope most of the world was in the grip on was powerful stuff. 

What the article didn't say—what most people, including Joan and Oren's mother, tended to gloss over—what that the war wasn't going to go away, and eventually the cost would go up.

\+ 

When Oren Watson was killed in action off the coast of northern California, the link between Apis Stinger’s Conn-Pod and LOCCENT sent out a staccato burst of static and terrible, screeching feedback; it was probably a mercy for everyone back at the Shatterdome, if mercy was a concept that even applied, because after the first scream, they didn't hear anything. Joan, struggling against the blood and sweat falling into her eyes, was hardly aware of the noise that filled in the husk of the ‘Pod; but sound didn't matter in the Drift, so Oren’s screams still reverberated in her skull, right up until she felt the familiar presence of his mind tear open and fall apart. 

The pain, immediate and overwhelming, hooked itself into the meat of Joan’s heart. Her arm already ached from where the Kaiju had bitten them; her hip ached from straining to keep up with Oren’s panicked, loping run; the Kaiju was standing over Apis Stinger and Oren was unmistakably dead. 

It took effort, real and monumental concentration, for Joan to raise up Apis’ remaining arm and drive the cannon into the Kaiju’s maw; and it took all of the steadiness Oren had ever laughed at Joan for possessing, to fire the cannon again and again, hoping the barbs on the sides of Apis’ arm would keep the Kaiju’s tender throat fastened around the weapon. She held on and kept holding on, though in the back of her head, in the empty space she’d always carved out for herself when Joan and Oren Drifted, Joan wondered why she bothered at all. 

It wasn’t until the Kaiju died, messily and violently, its corrosive blood damaging what remained of Apis’ armor, that Joan realized what had made her hold fast. Duty, of course, because Joan Watson was a good daughter and a shining star in the PPDC, but also revenge. She pushed the carcass away from Apis Stinger—with one arm gone, the other strained, and the legs of the Jaeger not much better, she couldn’t afford to trip if she could even manage to turn Apis around. It was a numb thought, but practical; Joan wasn’t sure why she was still thinking at all. Her head ached with loss; Apis’ controls frizzled and popped at her, the remaining screens going blank. She wouldn’t have been able to read them anyway, through her tears, but there was a moment—she wouldn’t be able to say, later how long—where she struggled to remember how to pick one foot up and place it in front of the other. 

She managed, or must have managed; when she blinked again, Apis had turned away from the frothy wreckage, and Joan was piloting the Jaeger back to land herself. The machine was battered open, the Conn-Pod exposed to the air, and Oren’s station was so empty that the notion jarred and reconfigured Joan’s understanding of physical space. Orin’s death echoed in her, ricocheted off of her bones. 

When the Pacific Ocean receded and Apis Stinger made the most inelegant, heartbreaking landfall of Joan’s career, she shuddered out of her restraints and gave up on movement for the moment; by the time the rescue crews found her, she had finally started shaking. She didn’t say anything aloud even when they’d gotten her back to the Shatterdome and whisked into the medical bay, because it wouldn’t have helped. 

They didn’t give her a private room, but they did stick a curtain around her, for privacy. Joan spent an interminable span of time probing at the raw and empty places in her skull; she was surprised that she could still multitask, and yet here she was: grieving and bleeding. Grieving and breathing. Grieving and probing the depth and breadth of the Oren-shaped hole the Drift had left in her. 

\+ 

It went without saying that she left the program, even though the world was still at war. 

Joan said, “I can’t invite someone else into my head.” She kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling and refused to meet Carrie’s gaze. Carrie Dwyer of all people should have known better than to ask Joan to climb into another Jaeger; they’d trained together, before and just after the war had started, back when Orin grew his hair long and Joan cut hers short and the two of them wandered around the dome arm in arm, bickering back and forth. Carrie knew how Joan and Orin had worked together, each picking up where the other left off, each of them distinct and inextricable from the other. 

“There’s a war going on and you can still help people,” Carrie said. “Don’t tell me Joan Watson can’t do something.” Guilt was a weapon, for Carrie; for the most part, it was efficient and didn’t draw blood, but it rarely worked when there was nothing left to lose. 

“I’m quitting the Rangers,” Joan said, turning as much away as the saline drip allowed her. “I can still help people; you’re right about that. But I need an alternative to hooking myself up to a ghost machine until I find some poor rookie who can ignore the baggage.” 

“I didn’t think you’d ever walk away from a fight,” Carrie said, because she and Joan both had been in the final stages of their medical residencies when K-Day had hit, and they had both joined up at the PPDC because they’d seen a need. 

“Better lucky than good,” Joan said. “Right now, I know I’m neither.” 

Carrie grimaced at the saying, but she didn’t try and argue with Joan again. The war aside, Carrie had never been much for hopeless causes. 

\+ 

When she walked out of the hospital, Joan had a set of dog tags, a single bag, and a heavy coat to her name. Oren had always accumulated more things than Joan ever did, and she couldn’t bear to sift through them. She took his coat and sent everything else home, to their mother. Joan didn’t send herself along with Oren’s things, because Joan knew this: she had scars running up and down one side of her body and a hole in her head. There wasn’t enough of her left over to justify going home. 

Her mother called her every now and then anyway, and Joan had tried to visit once, but Oren was still dead and the Watson family was too busy wrestling with the loss to manage loving one another in person. The weeklong stay became a painful, drawn-out weekend that ended when Joan packed her bag and her mother didn’t make even one halfhearted comment about waiting ‘til morning. 

“I’ll write you,” Joan promised over her shoulder. Her mother didn’t hug her as Joan left; looking back into the front room, Joan had a perfect view of her mother, and, on the wall behind her mother, of the _Vanity Fair_ photograph of Joan and Oren at the start of the war. It did a better job of damning her than her mother, who loved her, ever could. “I just don’t think I can stay.” 

“If you think that’s best,” her mother said in Mandarin; Joan had gotten a lot better at the language since the start of the war, but she still wasn’t sure what her mother was really saying, so she just nodded and left. 

She limped, a little, and had to keep switching her bag from hand to hand, but after she’d made it out onto the street, it was easy enough to disappear. 

\+ 

_Six years later_

As conflicts tended to, The Kaiju War kept on happening. 

Long after the science division had detected a pattern in the Kaiju attacks, long after the Jaegers had started flagging and the public had stopped believing that the day was eventually going to get saved, the Kaiju kept rising up out of the Pacific and walking or crawling their way to shore. Tommy Gregson was used to thinking of himself as a captain, but once he’d come out of retirement to join the PPDC he’d learned the chain of command was just a huge muddle, punctuated by jumps out to kill another Kaiju. The latest budget cuts—the impending demilitarization of the PPDC and the twilight of the Jaeger Program—didn’t mean a goddamn thing, when Gregson’s people could predict the next occurrence down to the day. 

Gregson wasn’t a fretful man—he was too patient for it—but if Hudson’s calculations were half as accurate as they usually were, the war was going to get a whole lot worse. It had been years since humanity had felt hopeful about the mess, but Gregson held on the scraps of it; he remembered working in law enforcement, back before K-Day. That had seemed hopeless too, some days, but he hadn’t seen the point in giving up the fight just because the bad guys never bothered to take a day off. The end of the world didn’t seem like a great time to start.


	2. Chapter 2

When Gregson got off the line with the United Nations Group, he turned to the other people who’d stayed in the room during the meeting. If Gregson had been a younger man, or an angrier one, he might have spat in frustration; the Kaiju Defense budget had been diverted, again and for the last time. He regretted allowing Sherlock Holmes in the room with him during the brief, even though Alfredo Llamosa—always a voice of reasons—was there as well, and had been instrumental in keeping Sherlock from yelling obstreperously at the screen.

“Don’t,” Gregson began. It was enough to make Sherlock go pink with irritation. That was the funny thing about Sherlock: he was either in control of every little thing, or he was a raw nerve. It was always one or the other, and lately he was a jittery mess. Gregson couldn't exactly blame him, but it really wasn't the time.

“Don’t what? One could say that you have already refrained enough for all of our current civilization,” Sherlock snapped. “The Kaiju have evolved, as has the expense of defending against them, but our learned subcommittee has declined to listen to the accumulated expertise of you, your command crew, and your science division.”

“Not to mention yourself,” Alfredo said, dry as toast. He didn’t make a move out of the doorway in which he was slouching, but he had the look of a man who might consider the movement in his own sweet time. As an added bonus, the space he occupied mad eit difficult for Sherlock to storm off without knocking into him—and Sherlock hated being touched even more than he seemed to love storming off. 

“What I meant was,” Gregson continued, satisfied that the situation was contained for the moment, “don’t go flying off the handle. The Jaeger Program is in Twilight. We can’t change that; you heard what they said, there’s no money for a fool’s hope nowadays. That doesn’t mean we’ll go down without a fight.” 

“When you put it like that,” Alfredo said, “it sounds like you’ve got a idea.”

“Likely one that involves great peril,” Sherlock said. He’d started pacing up and down the confines of the room, fast enough that Gregson was tired just looking at him. “You can get private investors if it’s spectacular enough an idea, to be sure—”

“It’s better than sitting around, that’s for sure,” Gregson said. “We’re gonna need a little help with the particulars, is all.” He looked at Alfredo and Sherlock; Alfredo looked contemplative, steady and ineffable as always. Sherlock was poised and shaking a little—he always did, in periods of stress—but he looked about as interested as Sherlock got in things that weren’t Jaeger skeletons and Kaiju viscera these days.

“In situations like these,” Alfredo said, stepping forward and taking a seat in one of the battered Eames chairs opposite Gregson’s desk.  He settled in, leaning forward on his elbows. “I think it’s best to start at the start and work through. Why don’t you lay it on out, and we’ll go from there.”

Gregson pulled out his own chair, though he didn’t take his eyes off Sherlock. “Why don’t I tell you a story,” he said.

 “Oh, joy,” snapped Sherlock. But he stayed.

 

+

 

The hospital alarms went off constantly. Joan didn't really hear them any more, or at least didn't wake at the noise, but it took a lot to wake anyone who'd been up for twenty-seven hours without a break. (Joan hadn't knowingly taken a break, but she knew herself: it was possible she had catnapped, sometime in the last couple hours.)

After Joan had left the military and figured out that going home wasn’t much of an improvement, she submitted a ream of paperwork and had her medical license reinstated. When K-Day had hit she’d been far enough along in her residency that the hospitals along the Pacific Coast had a convoluted recollection of her name, and once she studied for a month straight, it was easy enough to pick up a scalpel again. Carrie had been right: Joan could still help, and someone was always in need of fixing.

It likely no one even remembered that Oren Watson's surviving copilot was a woman. Joan had made it out of the Jaeger program alive and would always walk with a little bit of a limp, and her left shoulder would never quite be the same, but Oren was who people remembered. Besides, no one expected a surgeon to make eye contact, and she needed to do something with her hands. Spending eighteen hours at a time up to her elbows in the guts of humanity worked fine, and no one expected a surgeon to make idle chitchat in the ration line.

Traveling from hospital to hospital along the Rim and performing surgeries in the wake of the Kaiju attacks and construction injuries helped preserve that anonymity. What didn’t help, at least at her current station—the biggest mobile unit she’d ever seen—was that Anchorage wasn’t a sunny locale even in the best of winters, and the pollution from Kaiju invasions and the subsequent wall construction had made the skies even darker. Tempers were short, generators were inconsistent, and Joan was getting a bad reputation. She didn’t relate well to her fellow doctors, the nurses in her station had no respect for surgeons—Joan didn’t exactly blame them—and there was that hang up Joan had, where she sometimes forgot to answer when someone spoke to her because she was listening for what Oren might say in response. 

She fanned out her ration cards and slipped a yellow one from the booklet she’d been issued as an essential civilian. In SoCal, that yellow card had gotten her four ounces of meat a week; in Anchorage, even with the decimated ocean life and the reduced elk population, it got her four ounces a day. She wondered if it was worth not having oranges anymore.

 “Are you going to use that, Joanie?” Hnub, perennially hungry, was part of the Hmong community the hospital had displaced when it had set up closest to the current section of the Wall construction. Rather than join the crews, she’d gotten ajob as a PCT at the hospital. Her rations were pitiful but Hnub was friendly, or possibly desperate; Joan didn’t mind sharing if she didn’t have to talk, and Hnub talked enough for the both of them. 

Joan tapped the card before sliding it over. “Unless it’s good for a beer,” she said.

“Another fall today?” The card slipped itself into Hnub’s pocket, quick as a wish, and Joan sighed. It must have been a ration card good for beer.

“As long as they have a couple hundred guys hanging out on a ledge in cold weather, there are gonna be falls,” she said. “Most of them can’t handle the heights.” 

“Oh, and you could,” Hnub said, edging away from Joan’s table and close to the ration line. “That wall’s kissing the sky.” 

“Heights don’t bother me,” Joan said. She shoved her ration booklet back into her jacket and stood, debating between going to her section of the hospital tent—the other surgeons called it the dormitory, but Joan had been in the military and it was hard not to think of it as a barracks—and seeing if any of her older cards would get her calories worth consuming when the sound of a military helicopter broke through the fog and rumbled in and around the clearing. The hospital tent joined up with the ration hall, and Joan had been slouched at a table shoved in the hallway connecting the two; she was close enough to the exit that it was easy to make it outside before the helicopter landed.

 It had been five years and eight months since Joan had heard the sound of a military helicopter; it sounded sharper and louder and safer than the ‘copters the EMTs flew in to the hospital on rare occasions, and anyway, it wasn't the kind of sound a person forgot, least of all a person like Joan Watson.

When it landed, a man got out: before K-Day, Joan wouldn’t have called him old, though he was certainly older. Now, he looked bent over and grey at every edge, like the Old Man Winter some of the more superstitious foremen talked about in the ration line. Thomas Gregson had come out of retirement to join up with the PPDC, and for a while, he'd been the oldest active ranger in rotation. Even that had been a long time ago, and the years hadn’t been kind. Joan had the feeling that she didn't look too hot herself, wearing scrubs and an oversized sweater, at least three months past needing a haircut.

Still, he was instantly recognizable. Joan never worked with Marshal Gregson--he'd come out of retirement just after Oren died--but she'd heard about him, and it wasn’t like she never turned on a television.

She met Gregson at the door of the hospital, near where the porters smoked if the monthly cigarette shipment had made it in.

"Marshal," she said, once he was close enough her voice wasn’t drowned out y the generators. "I'm surprised to see you here."

"I'm not too surprised to see you," he said. "You trained as a civilian doctor, before you joined up, if I remember."

"I had almost a year left on my residency," Joan said. "Turns out it just takes paperwork and feet on the ground. I had the time; why not help?"

"Glad to see you’re putting those skills to good use,” Gregson said, nodding to the hospital tent behind her.

"Somehow I don’t get the sense that you’re here to discuss my career path," Joan said. She re-wrapped her sweater around herself, mostly for something to do with her hands. “From what I’ve heard, you’re a busy man." 

Gregson made a helpless gesture. It reminded Joan of her grandfather. "You may have heard a rumor about the PPDC's funding. That's true: I won't lie to you. They're cutting us down."

"The wall's not going to last," Joan said. She wasn't surprised at the decision; more resigned to it. The hospital had three generators and barely enough morphine to get through another landfall, if the roads got cut off. One thing Joan had learned over the past six months in Anchorage was that the roads always got cut off this far north. On top of that, the man who had died on her table three hours ago had been the tenth fall from the top of the construction point in the past two weeks. There were still hundreds of youngish, mostly fit men to keep building, but the cost was rising.

“There someplace we can talk?” 

 

+

 

Even before Joan led Gregson into the hospital and found a surgical room that the janitors hadn’t had time to scrub down, she had a notion that he was going to ask her to come back.

“Why me?” she asked, as soon as the door shut behind them. Oren probably wouldn’t have even asked, she thought; he would have gotten into that helicopter as soon as it had landed. 

“The Jaeger Program’s in Twilight,” Gregson said. “We’re shutting down the long way—we have about a year and a half to finish scrapping the machines and shutting down the last Shatterdome on the Rim, and then we all go home and wait for the end of the world. It’s not ideal; but in the meantime, the PPDC’s gotten a little extra folding money from a private investor. It’s not much in terms of Jaegers, because those things make the U.S. deficit in 2010 look like loose change, but it was enough to pull a Mark III out of the scrap heap and take a look at finding a pilot.”

“How many other pilots did you go to before you came here?” Joan knew the answer; she wanted to hear him say it. 

Gregson didn’t flinch. “Zero, Dr. Watson. All the other Mark III pilots are dead. You, on the other hand, are very much alive."

Joan looked at the mess on the operating table between them and wondered how exactly she was going to climb back into a Conn-Podd and Drift with someone who wasn’t Oren. Gregson didn’t rush her; he waited out the long minutes—it wasn’t a full half of an hour, but it was close—as Joan thought about putting down her scalpel and getting into that helicopter.

On the news report that had been playing in the entryway to the rations tent, the televisions had shown the aftermath from latest Kaiju landfall—Australia—and the pilots climbing down from their big Mark VII. Those pilots had looked angry and exhausted. “We’re in the middle of fighting a fuckin’ war,” Sebastian Moran had snapped at the camera. “Get that thing out of my face.”

His co-pilot had been a little more graceful. “I don’t see the point in asking us what our stance is on the Wall versus the Jaeger Program,” Violet Moran had said. “I mean, the Kaiju are still coming and the Wall’s not finished—what do you expect me to do, retire? What a waste of resources.” She had said it the same half amused, half self-deprecating way Joan imagined Oren might have said “waste of resources,” though that might have been the lack of sleep. It wasn’t the lack of sleep now—or at least that wasn’t the bulk of it—that made her turn the word “waste” over in her head, again and again.

 Joan thought about the empty space in her head where Oren’s memories of their shared childhood had always insinuated themselves, thought about how it would feel for someone else to try and fit that shape. She thought about living the rest of her life doing a job that didn’t really mean anything and that she didn’t care about, versus doing something that would hurt and that would matter.

Joan took deep breath. The old reek of the surgery stung, but she held the inhalation for the time it took her to count to seven before letting it out. Gregson was still waiting for an answer.

“I suppose you have a point,” she said. “And I’ve got to die of something.”

“Might as well do some good,” Gregson said.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Sherlock had felt an unfamiliar tension running beneath his skin for the better part of the day, a fact that was notable because Sherlock cataloged every infinite sensation he encountered, and this particular nervousness—excitement—anxiety—was outside the usual rush and push and cacophony of the Shatterdome. Gregson had been gone nearly a week and was due back at any moment, but Sherlock let that knowledge percolate in favor of focusing on the incessant, un-ignorable sensation. It was incessant.

He didn’t realize that it was a feeling affecting more than just himself until he nearly ran into Marcus Bell, who was standing inconveniently off to one side of the Jaeger Bay.

“In a hurry, huh,” Bell said, once the collision had been narrowly avoided. “I’d be too, if I had any reason to run and meet the Marshal. Word is he’s on his way back, and he’s bringing in a new pilot.”

The new pilot. Joan Watson. An old pilot, really, in all the ways that counted, and a puzzle on top of it. Sherlock felt some of the tension run out of him; he’d forgotten what day it was.

“Yes,” he answered, a beat too late. Bell tactfully ignored the lapse, which was one of the reasons Sherlock didn’t actually mind Bell’s company. “For the project.” The project that was in the next bay over, towering and empty and scarred.

“Don’t get too hung up on the details,” Bell advised, already moving past Sherlock and into the hangar proper, obviously aware that the conversational line was not something Sherlock was disposed toward at the moment. Smart man, Marcus Bell, though it was clear that his piloting style could use some refining—the older Bell (Andre, Sherlock reminded himself) was a little less calculating, a little more powerful, and the dissimilarities made watching footage of their Jaeger all the more interesting; Sherlock was fascinated with how well their neural handshake held, despite the stylistic conflicts between the two.

No matter; Sherlock wasn’t really interested in the Bell brothers at the present moment, any more than he was interested in the Moran twins, or Alfredo’s latest attempts to teach Sherlock how to play mahjong. He knew as much as there was to know about Joan Watson, which was to say he knew all the documented facts from her time in the PPDC, but the woman had disappeared rather neatly after the Kaiju battle that had killed her co-pilot. He did not know if the time in between her departure and her return had changed her in any meaningful way; all he knew was that Gregson had tasked him with narrowing down the scope of prospective partners for Watson as the PPDC approached the end of days. Sherlock was many things, and competent at sorting through masses of data was the least of it. He had compiled the pilot records in less than sixty hours; that had been a little over a month ago.  

While his mind had been occupied with these thoughts, Sherlock’s feet had carried him into the Jaeger Bay proper. Alfredo met him at the rusted scaffolding up to the main level of LOCCENT. Sherlock usually wanted to talk to Alfredo. When Alfredo was being sensible, Sherlock could usually lay out the blueprints for the remaining Jaegers and discuss the PPDC’s dwindling resources. Judging from his posture—shoulders held lax in the way that meant Alfredo had to think about relaxing, arms folded across his chest, all the buttons of his over shirt done up to the neck—Alfredo wasn’t looking to talk about Jaegers at all.

“Sherlock,” Alfredo said. “Gregson’s back with the new pilot, go meet them on the deck.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Sherlock said, already moving past, but Alfredo caught hold of Sherlock’s elbow—and Sherlock flinched, because he hated, hated being touched— but all Alfredo did was press an umbrella into Sherlock’s hand.

“Thought you hated being the last one to know something,” was all Alfredo said. He didn’t let go of Sherlock’s elbow, though the grip wasn’t at all harsh, and Sherlock could have pulled away with little or no effort.

“I know the name of the pilot, I know her history, I know who she will fight against in the trials to locate her co-pilot.” Sherlock closed his hand around the umbrella, listened to the sound of the rain cascading down on the yawning roof overhead. He had better grab another umbrella; Gregson would need one, and Sherlock was not interested in braving Hong Kong’s elements again. 

“Not everything is deducible,” Alfredo said. His tone of voice was infinitely gentler than Sherlock’s father’s voice had been when he had yelled at his son to _get out of the bloody house_. Alfredo gave Sherlock a little push—Sherlock was nearly sure it was meant as encouragement—and Sherlock moved with it, intent on finding another umbrella. Gregson was not a big man, but nor was he a small one; Sherlock, in a similarly unmemorable percentile of the height-weight charts, did not like the chances of three people walked beneath one umbrella and any of them remaining dry.

 

+++

 

The Joan Watson who stepped out of the helicopter and under the shelter of Sherlock’s umbrella was quite different from the Joan Watson whose file he had spent the past six months analyzing. She was leaner than she was six years ago, and judging from her medical reports, Watson had never had much fat to spare. Unsurprisingly, she had the tired, drawn look of someone who’d spent a measurable amount of time working against her circadian rhythms—which made sense, if she was living in Alaska. Sherlock was positive that she was working in Alaska. She wore thin grey medical scrubs over a set of silk long underwear, with a bulky maroon cardigan wrapped about her shoulders and a leather jacket too large and too battered to actually belong to her over the whole kit. To top off the look, which was, Sherlock thought snidely, hospital-chic at best, she was wearing calf-high snow boots lined with ugly, functional shearling. Her hands were bare, the nails brutally clean and short. She looked as though she’d come from the surgery Sherlock was sure she’d been staffing, judging from the way her hair was tied back unflatteringly from her face.

It was her face that surprised him, even though Sherlock had seen it before, in pictures: she looked serious in nearly every photograph, but now she looked quite tired. He wondered if she’d slept on the helicopter, and thought she hadn’t; but there were lnearly imperceptible crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes, which he didn’t expect. Sherlock stared at her a bit longer than was polite, wondering if those lines were from smiling or laughing or crying or looking very close at viscera in low light conditions.

“Joan Watson,” Gregson said, a hair too loud, probably a holdover from hours in the helicopter, talking and not talking over the sound of the blades, “meet Sherlock Holmes. He solves a lot of riddles for us, and he’s been heading up the Jaeger Restoration Project.”

Before Gregson could introduce Watson in return, Sherlock butted in to the conversation—there wasn’t anything Gregson could have told him that he didn’t already know, and so he said, “Yes, about what I’d expected, let’s move along, shall we?”

Gregson rolled his eyes and started moving, holding his umbrella low above his shoulders; that left Sherlock underneath the other with Joan Watson, who looked up at him and asked, “What exactly did you expect?” She sounded curiously un-offended—Sherlock was rather used to people reacting to him, rather than responding, but it seemed that Joan Watson was going to offer up more than one exception to the rule, if she continued to display information-seeking behavior.

 Sherlock would have told her what he had expected to see—the Watson duo hadn’t been a secret, after all, and the catastrophe that had led to Joan Watson’s impermanent discharge from the PPDC was even less so—but the science division, if that was how once could in any conscience refer to the partnership of Dr. Drummond and Ms. Hudson, came alongside them, pushing a glass tube full of Kaiju remnants before them. As usual, Drummond was in the lead and under a waterproof coat, with Hudson, her hair tucked impeccably beneath a plastic cap, bringing up the rear. They were both of them tall and blonde, Kathryn Drummond the shorter and fairer and more insufferable of the two, which helped them stand out in a crowd, but it was really Kathryn’s incessant nattering about Kaiju specimens that caught the ear. Sherlock regretted sleeping with her; the sex had not been worth having to listen to her talking about alien viscera and its impact on ocean life. To make matters worse, Kathryn Drummond was making ahabit of analyzing hime, and Sherlock didn’t have an iota of patience for the tendency.

“Don’t jostle it, it’s still living tissue! Stop gawking, start moving,” She snapped. She had her hands pressed up against the glass of the case, and the twitching remains cast shadows on her unremarkably pale skin. “It’s in good enough condition that Sherlock can use it as a model for his next tattoo,” a statement delivered with a dose of withering scorn. Sherlock pretended to ignore the jibe, but it was a difficult prospect: Joan Watson and Ms. Hudson had both flinched, and neither one of them had been able to avoid looking at the ink on his arms.

“You’re being rude, Kathryn,” Ms. Hudson chided. “Look, we’ve got company, it won’t do to take the kid gloves off yet.” She extended a hand to Watson, who shook it without hesitation. 

“It’s quite a specimen. I’m sure your division needs all the information you can glean from it,” Watson said, sounding blandly professional. She didn’t look back at Sherlock; he would have noticed, as she was the least familiar person in the elevator and he was still learning her motions. 

Sherlock didn’t have kaiju tattooed on his arms, or at least didn’t have _only_ kaiju tattooed on his arms, but few people looked close enough to know the difference. Kathryn, who did know the difference, didn’t care, and preferred to cause trouble. It was one of her more exasperating qualities. As always, around her, he was angry enough to be indiscreet—but angry enough to hold his tongue, too, and so he didn’t ay anything, just clenched his arms behind his back and pitched his weight to and fro on the balls of his feel until the elevator came to a stop and they all of them disembarked, Kathryn pushing to the head of the throng to better control the tipping sway of the kaiju tank.

Gregson cleared his throat and touched Joan Watson’s elbow to get her attention; Sherlock realized that she had developed a peculiar, inward look that made her hard to read.

“Ms. Watson,” Gregson began, making as if to lead her into the Shatterdome proper, but Watson pulled her arm free and smiled without showing any of her teeth.

‘It’s ‘doctor,’ actually,” she said, and stepped around him, making her own way to the  engineering bay. “What exactly are you hoping to accomplish, now that you’ve got one half of a Mark III piloting team back after a lengthy hiatus? I get the sense you’re preparing for your finest hour.”

“Something like that,’ Gregson said, and walked after her. Sherlock moved to keep up, but kept silent, too intent on listening to what Watson said and how she said it to contribute much else to Gregson’s exposition. “We needed another team to do something big—we’re almost out of funding, which I am sure comes as no surprise—but if we’re going to die, we might as well do it in a Jaeger.”

Watson had a look on her face that suggested she knew a thing or two more about death than Gegson might, but Sherlock noticed that she held her peace.

“What Gregson is, of course, leaving to the end of the discussion, is what you’ll be piloting,” Sherlock said into the brief pause—it wasn’t a silence, because the Shatterdome was never silent: the Moran twins were blasting some terrible musical noise that Sherlock didn’t know enough about, and Marcus and Andre Bell were playing H-O-R-S-E or its Mandarin equivalent at a hoop they’d affixed to a support beam near the feet of their Jaeger. The sound of welding and laughter and cursing overlapped with his voice, but he’d pitched the statement high enough that Watson gave him her attention. Her attention was so complete, Sherlock thought, that on anyone else it might have been referred to a _regard_.

“There’s nothing new,” she said.

“Ah, but what once was old can be made new again,” Sherlock told her. “I’m sure you remember the Apis Stinger?”

 

+++

 

The hours spilled over into days, and if Joan had not been used to the steady thrum of life going on despite her, she might have been overwhelmed. But even after meeting the other pilots—she liked the Bell brothers, who were friendly and professionally flirtatious and felt more cautious about Sebastian Moran and his twin sister—and having Sherlock present her old Jaeger to her, Joan still kept to her feet. Seeing Apis Stinger made new again was a little like seeing a ghost, not that Joan had a lot of experience with ghosts at all—it would have made sense for her to see Oren in every moment of her waking life, but that wasn’t the case, even if that was about how her mother got through the day. "He died wrong," Mary had said, the one time Joan had asked, before they’d stopped speaking to one another. "There was nothing to dispose of in the wake. Ghosts are appropriate." Joan supposed she would know for sure once she re-entered the drift: everything that was ever anything had always lived there.

She wondered who would pilot with her; Gregson had made a vague noise about it not being decided yet, and Alfredo Llamosa had made some crack about fighting for the honor. She had asked Gregson’s shadow if he had any intention of entering the drift, and he had gone suddenly silent. Alfredo had told her, later, that Sherlock Holmes was the exact opposite of drift compatible with anyone, let alone someone like her. 

Joan wasn’t so sure on that count; it was obvious Sherlock was one of Gregson's hopeless rescue projects, although perhaps more likely to make it through than most; he had the shaking hands of a recovering addict and the razor edge of an impeccable cadet, and from the moment she had seen him, Joan had felt a little of the empty space in her—the space Orin had lived in—soften at the edges. Joan liked helping people who had more obvious damage than she did. Sherlock was a traumatized headchanger from the Atlantic; it was easy mathematics. 

What didn’t make sense was Gregson’s master plan. Destroying the breech with a massive payload wasn’t a foreign concept. It just wasn’t something that had ever worked, even taking into account the mind and mathematical theories of Ms. Hudson.

“We got the nuclear devices from some contacts the Morans have cultivated,” Gregson had told her when Joan had questioned him, never mind that _how_ wasn’t what she had asked. “They can get ahold of anything.”

“I’ve been a doctor in a work-camp hospital for over five years,” Joan had said. “Give me a break. I know about the black market.”

 Gregson looked a little abashed and nodded. “You mean, how will we deliver the payload.”

“In a nutshell.”

“It’s one of our science division—we only have the two now, but at least they’re the best of the best. You’ll have to talk to her to get the full of it, but Ms. Hudson has the math figured on when the next kaiju should come through, and when the breach is open, we’ll have our shot.”

“And if we miss it, we’ll have died in a Jaeger.”

He had smiled at her, looking kindly and a little older than she suspected Gregson actually is. “That’s the idea, Dr. Watson.”

Now, waiting for the next round of tests—Joan hadn’t let another medical professional other than Carrie near her before she’d left the PPDC, and they’re giving her a series of workups before she begins looking at drift compatibility—she thought about the hospital, how the work she’d been doing there had seemed like penance. If it hadn’t been a way to punish herself.

The next morning, they called her to the Kwoon. Because she knew what Gregson and his people were about, Joan went, mildly grateful at how she’d practiced the Jaeger Bushido even after she’d changed careers. She took her shoes off at the edge of the mats and picked up her staff and got used to the sensation of Sherlock Homes’ eye burning a hole in between her shoulder blades—Joan had been right about him. Gregson knew Sherlock Holmes was not a terrible pilot candidate, even if he seemed like a mess of a human being, and Gregson didn’t want them to spar together. And so Joan slogged through a long, boring set of matches against a crowd of achingly young pilot trainees. A little over half of the candidates were women, a statistic Joan didn’t think mattered much in the post-Kaiju world. They all fought the same way: precise, clean, a little too good at the moves to have ever been in a real fight. Joan began to resent the exercise after the twelfth bout. They all end the same way: they fight and she lets them score a point or two for the sake of their vanity before knocking them over. After a while of this, Sherlock made a noise of irritation.

Joan had been wondering how long it would take him to say something; Sherlock might be a mystery to ninety-six percent of the Shatterdome, but after a few days in his company, going over the new schematics for Apis Stinger, Joan knew that for all his intelligence, Sherlock was a prissy, emotional creature at heart.

“If you have something to say,” she said, dropping her staff and turning to face him, “then please just say it.”

He looked about ready to drop his sheaf of notes. “You obviously know the bushido well enough that you could have ended these bouts several points earlier,” he said. “You’re getting sloppy, and it is not because you are tired.” He really was upset about it; Joan knew, because Sherlock so far had been polite, and there was noting nice about the way he was using his body to intimidate her, for all that he was standing off the mat and she was on it, and there was considerable space between them.

She spread her arms wide and set her stance: Joan knew how it looked, half beseeching and half mocking. Her tank top was showing sweat stains beneath her arms and along her back, but not quite beneath her breastbone: she was wearing a pair of combat trousers borrowed from Violet Moran. She had tied her hair back and it was starting to hurt, a little prickle of tension at her temples and the back of her head. Sherlock was dressed normally, which was to say, in layers, with the cuffs of his shirt buttoned close at the wrists. He looked like an unrumpled academic from a world that no longer existed.

“Come on, if you’re going to,” she told him. Gregson rolled his eyes at the both of them—Joan supposed it was all a bit melodramatic, but it was Gregson’s fault for making the whole thing a beauty pageant—and Sherlock pushed his notes at Alfredo and toed off his boots. He stripped down to just one of his shirts before he stepped on the mat with Joan, and she realized that Dr. Drummond hadn’t just been riling him up, when they’d met in the elevator: Sherlock did have kaiju tattoos. They looked fresh, compared to the rest of his ink, and she wondered if the monsters were meant to hide his track marks.

When they began fighting, if the Jeager Bushido could actually be called _fighting_ , Joan remembered that Sherlock wasn’t, for all his posturing, a big man—he was broad and rangy, too thin the way almost everyone was too thin nowadays—but he was still taller than Joan, taller than Oren ever was. The way he fights is and is not at odds with his size: clumsy, possibly shocking, and the dirty kind of brutal. He wasn’t exactly in perfect form, and after knocking down the Academy’s finest all morning, Joan was beginning to run out of grace herself.

Still, the improbable happened: Sherlock moved and Joan knew how he was going to move before he’d quite gotten around to it. Part of it was experience: Sherlock was smaller than a lot of people he might fight, but Joan was smaller still, and she had had a lifetime of fighting with taller men. And as she moved to flip him over her hip and onto his back, Sherlock knew that it was her weak hip, the one with the scars burned into her from when Oren had died, and he moved out of the way. He wasn’t fast enough to avoid a hit to the ribs, and she wasn’t fast enough to avoid a tap to her shin, and pretty soon, the two of them were evenly matched. Joan ducked another hit and twisted, and this time she did manage to knock him over—his staff against her throat and hers against the tip of his nose. Point and match.

It was very quit in the Kwoon when they stood up, and Gregson had a look on his face that reminded Joan of interview footage with the parents of missing children. She could hear Sherlock breathing hard next to her, and so Joan reached out and touched his wrist, gently and with just two of her fingers. Sherlock looked at her and everyone else was looking at Sherlock. For a moment, a brief and shining moment, Joan knew that they were in agreement.

“I have found my partner,” she said. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kathryn Drummond is the Kathryn Drummond from "The Deductionist," an otherwise unfortunate episode in the Elementary canon.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The events of [take it too far](http://archiveofourown.org/works/942357) occur within this chapter, but have not been duplicated within this text.

Gregson called her to his office shortly after Joan and Sherlock’s little display in the Kwoon.

“He wasn't supposed to drift with anybody,” Gregson said, once she’s sat down. “I love that kid, but he's never been what you call stable.” He coughed a little, and sighed, and added, “plus there's the drug thing. I don’t have his medical documents, but—we don't know how that goes over in the drift.”

Joan said, "Sherlock will not be a problem." Sherlock was a great mystery, but Joan had figured him out on day one, for the most part, in all the ways that mattered.

“It ain't because he's a good choice, if that's the case.”

“He's an asshole,” Joan conceded. “But he could be very good, Marshal Gregson, and he'll work harder than anyone else you could spare. I can work with that.”

She didn’t try to explain how she and Orin had been more parallel than they had been compatible, how she loved him and was resigned to Orin's behavior out of the Conn-Pod. It was a difficult thing to articulate, even though she had some experience doing so: Joan had done therapy for a while, after she had left the PPDC. They wouldn't have let her near a surgery if she hadn't, especially with her war record. Oren could always tell when Joan's poker face was secretly expressing distress, but her doctor had no notion, no notion at all, which didn’t impress Joan much. Maybe her therapist didn’t recognize Joan's post-traumatic stress because everyone alive had some form of it.

Joan couldn’t blame her old therapist for not understanding what it was like in the Drift, how it had been in the Drift with Oren: Joan had loved her brother and sometimes hated him, but in the Drift, she had always understood him. She knew Gregson had drifted, had had a drift partner who was still alive but with whom things had ended badly. It didn’t quite compare, but she had the notion that Gregson of all people might understand that there was a wild, terrible part of Joan's skull that would never quite heal over from watching that monster tear open a safe place, from feeling the final thready moments of Oren’s terror as the teeth went though him. It didn’t matter that Joan couldn’t have stopped or changed the way Oren died; that was the worst of it, that they had known what they were getting in to, that they had believed along with everyone else that it was worth the cost. Joan had known, as she fought with Sherlock, that he had the potential to challenge and shape her, just as she had the potential to challenge and shape him. It was an intangible sense, but it was one that might, possibly, keep the both of them alive. Joan was content with surviving; she wondered if Sherlock was the same.

 

+

 

It was clear, from her discussion with Gregson and from the responses throughout the Shatterdome, that Sherlock had never been a formal candidate. Joan sought out Alfredo and he laid the matter out for her, more coherently than Gregson had when she had been called into his office.

“Gregson isn't fool enough to want Sherlock near a Jaeger if he can help it,” Alfredo said. They were standing on the walkway above the rebuilt exterior of the Apis Stinger, and Joan had to work hard to focus on what Alfredo had to say—the metallic glint of light in the corner of her eye was a distraction. “You know there aren't a lot of Jaegers left, and Sherlock’s still pretty twitchy. No one really knows how headchangers affect the system long term—”

Joan nodded. Headchangers could linger, she was certain; there had been men working on the wall who had been addicts. The hallucinations came and went, coupled with the sweeping focus and euphoria the drug was known for, usually mean they died before they came down from the scaffolding. Alfredo saw her grasp the concept and skipped forward. Joan thought she liked that quality: Alfredo was a practical man, but he was not an unemotional one.

“Sherlock has had, hands down, some of the best ideas for enhancing older Jaeger models to fight new categories of Kaiju, better ideas than most of the engineering crew, so it makes sense to let him look over the blueprints, to suggest alterations. Some engineers in the Hong Kong Shatterdome think what Sherlock does is amazing,” Alfredo continued, “and it is—but they also think he only had those insights because he used to spend eighty percent of his time shooting up with headchangers.”

“That’s unlikely,” Joan said. “I’ve seen headchanger addicts before—the drugs lift you up, but then they cut you off at the knees. If Sherlock’s a genius, it wasn’t the drugs that made him one.”

Alfredo smiled. It reached his eyes and made him look less exhausted, more like someone who believed in Sherlock Holmes, someone Joan could have been friendly with if the world hadn’t gone to hell.

He leaned over the railing, which gave Joan permission to look at Apis Stinger again, to see the scars she carried and changes that Sherlock and Alfredo had made to her. It was intuitive work, the work of someone who was an excellent mechanic and had the potential to be a very good pilot. Joan had thought that perhaps the reason she and Sherlock had fought so well together was because they had recognized each other in some way, hollow and sharp edged. Now she wondered if it had something to do with the way the both of them had relied on Apis Stinger to save their lives, if in radically different ways.

“In case it isn’t obvious,” Alfredo said, more to the Jaegers below the scaffolding than to Joan, “Sherlock Holmes came here with a lot of strings attached. His family’s loaded, and I get the sense that as long as he’s here, Gregson gets paid for the trouble.”

 “Convenient,” Joan said.

“It’s not, really,” Alfredo said. “But it sure looks that way to the casual observer.”

 

+

 

It annoyed Gregson to no end, but he gave consent for Sherlock to attempt the drift. Sherlock had, for once, a very limited amount of ego about the whole procedure. But there was little reason to worry: despite a lengthy lapse in the practice, Joan Watson was recorded as being a steady drift partner, one who gave little of herself away. Sherlock reasoned that he gave away even less: he was certain the drift would be much like the rest of his interactions with humanity.

“You look good,” Watson said when he joined her in the Conn-Pod. “I’ll need to take the right side, by the way.” It wasn’t an apology.

“Acceptable,” he said, sort and clipped and wondering what she was thinking. He would know in a minute. She had left hair down and tucked into the collar of her suit; Sherlock remembered that in every single photo of Joan Watson the PPDC had on file, she had worn it short. He hadn’t stood so close to her since they had fought in the Kwoon, and then he hadn’t noticed the freckles that were scattered, neatly and asymmetrically, across her face. The suit covered her arms entirely, but he remembered the burn patterns that curved around her shoulder and down her left arm: not enough to quite hinder her movements, but enough that Watson would have difficulty interacting with the Jaeger’s systems. He stepped into place and waited, vibrating, as Alfredo counted down to the neural handshake.

When he entered the Drift—and Sherlock had never before thought of the Drift, which he had known was silent, as having any color to it at all—he was overcome by scenes from Watson's life. “Overcome” was an inaccurate word. He had always had an academic understanding of the Pons system, but had assumed it was something less immediate, a vignette, a flash of insight: he had expected to see facts he already knew. Instead he saw Watson with her brother, felt her affectionate irritation in a thousand interactions from her academy days. He felt the stark disconnect of her life before Oren's death, and the way she had lived after it: the feel of the guts of a surgery patient, the knowledge of her body and her life and her role as a cog in a grand machine.

The flashes were not an invasion: Watson was a careful host, and her pain was not the only thing she carried with her. He did not know how to solve it.

Sherlock was simultaneously, painfully aware of her knowledge of him, of his past, of his shameful secrets: the way it felt to have another's fist connect with his face, the way Irene had once kissed and licked and caressed and bit him (the terrible knowledge of her death echoed in him, deep enough for Watson to get lost in); and the giddy, impossible brightness of the headchangers coursing through him, making Sherlock something different, lighter, something unhinged. He could feel her watching a flash of his old self, shooting up, the high of the drugs irrevocably linked to the cursing sense of reality that always returned.

Sherlock nearly went down the rabbit hole, at that: to escape or revist the past, he had no notion. Watson called out, just his name, and he centered. She knew him, in the Drift, all his clicks and idiosyncrasies, his rushing brain, his appalling way of speaking to others, his intelligence, his lack of goodness. He knew her caution and her steadiness, her curiosity her loneliness and her loyalty and her slow resentment at having had to survive this world on her own.

The neural handshake held. For the very first time in his recollection, Sherlock moved and someone else kept up with him.

 

+

 

It did not surprise Joan that Sherlock was just as prissy and exact when they drifted. His mind stuttered over the wide blank in hers, and then filled it, and she filled the gaping chasm in his—Joan learned what it was like to love someone named Irene, to lose her, to get caught up in headchanger after headchanger, like maybe that would help him get through it, like maybe he could see Irene again, touch her, fuck her, ask her what she’d been thinking when she’d run into the crown of black market organ harvesters. What had surprised her was that he lost control—not enough to damage the Apis Stinger, and not enough to cause any real damage, but enough to throw them almost entirely out of sync before she called him out on it. It wasn’t much; Joan had been part of training exercises with worse lapses, and had been part of actual missions with less of an emotional hangover.

After they disengaged, and after Alfredo took a sheaf of notes, they went to the mess hall. Sherlock picked a completely stupid fight with Sebastian Moran—Joan would get the entire story later, from Marcus, but for now she would chalk it up to Sherlock pretending to stand up for her when he was really just massaging his pride—and after she scolded him, Sherlock slunk away and Joan set about finding him. It wasn’t difficult. Practically, she brought a tray and a carton of papaya juice, which she knew he loathed, and she arrived to the scaffolding set over Apis Stinger just in time to see him fussing with a headchanger, flipping the dose over and over between his fingers. He didn’t have any real intent—Joan would have been able to read it off of him, she’d trained for this—and besides, she still had little echoes of his brilliance fading in and out in her head—for a brief moment, part of her wanted to throw him over the side of the scaffolding along with the dose. She sat beside him and leaned against him—the drift hangover lessened—and Joan waited until he passed the dose to her. She shoved the little vial into her bra and he reached, uncomplainingly, for the juice.

"If you continue like this, you'll compromise us in the field," Joan said. "If you compromise us in the field, you and I will die. I don't want to die, but if you do, there are a lot of options open to you. Just don't make me part of them."

"Or what," Sherlock said. "I have no need of your counsel, Watson, I'm fully capable of—"

"If you can't do this, I will write a formal report stating you are unfit for duty. I will submit it to Gregson." She exhaled hard through her nose. "I don't need to kick your ass to get you out of the line of fire. I don't need to kick your ass to get you to take a hard look at your options. You've done all the work for me; getting you removed from service would be easier than anything I've ever done." Joan had killed Kaiju, and after that she had tried and not always succeeded at keeping people alive on an operating table. She wasn’t prone to exaggeration.

Sherlock didn’t physically flinch, but most of the color left his face. Joan was not finished, and so she kept talking.

"You're valuable," she said. "You're my co-pilot. But if you think I'll let you self-destruct when I can stop it? Don't underestimate me. I'll do what it takes to make sure you'll come out of this war intact."

"My—a woman named Irene Adler died when the Kaiju attacked Vladivostok." Sherlock swallowed and Joan caught a glimpse of a memory, of Irene existing and then not existing. "I did not take her passing well. But I have my work, now; and revenge is terribly strong, strong enough to keep a man sober." He looked over at her, and the gesture was furtive and a little contrite. Joan appreciated Sherlock’s vulnerability: she had been inside his head earlier that morning. She didn’t need him to posture now.

Joan knew the truth of fighting Kaiju up close, knew that the monsters had always seen targets and not individuals. Having had Kaiju jaws within meters of her face, Joan thought she was better qualified than most to know that Sherlock's desire for revenge was pointless, pointless—but she understood it. She recognized the need, the unsteadiness.

“I’m glad to hear that,” she told him. Sherlock shrugged, and picked listlessly at the food on the tray, peeling the crust from a roll of bread in a slow spiral. She ignored that, even though bread was a luxury after months of caribou meat. “Sherlock—much as I appreciate it, I’m not the person you need to apologize to.”

She didn’t have to say that Gregson deserved an explanation. Sherlock might be clean but, even if Sherlock' father kept funneling money into the program, Sherlock hadn't come clean.

“My dear Watson,” Sherlock sighed. “I do so hate it when you’re right.” 

 

 

+

 

It was shame, which was not a foreign sensation to him at all, that propelled Sherlock to Gregson’s office after Watson left him to ruminate on the scaffolding.

It wasn’t unusual for Sherlock to enter Gregson’s office: but the fact remained that he was usually in Alfredo’s company, and he usually had the armor of the jauger program about him. Gregson looked up from his papers as Sherlock entered, and removed his reading glasses. He did not look surprised to see Sherlock.

 “Do we have something to talk about?” Gregson asked. There wasn’t any accusation in the question, but there was the terrible tone of a man who knew what was about to pass. Sherlock evaluated that sound and let it sink into his skin. It did not sound in any way like an absolution, and so he forced himself to speak.

“I have never spoken to you about what it was I did before I came here,” He began. He was meandering; he was prolonging the inevitable. This was a quality Sherlock had never considered to be part of his makeup. “I have told myself dozens of excuses. They are that, by the way—excuses. But the truth is that I am embarrassed. I did not wish to diminish your regard for my abilities, or to undermine your esteem for my work.”

“Is this about your drug habit?” Gregson asked. “’Cause if you think I just let you stay on here, even with the amount of cash your family dropped off at the door with you, you don’t have a lot of regard for my ability to do my own homework.”

Sherlock swallowed. “I have great respect for your professionalism, Marshal. And your intelligence.”

 “Sherlock,” Gregson said. “I always knew about the drugs. It was my business to know, especially after—we needed funding for this dome, and I had to talk to some people. And it’s never hard to figure out what’s going on in a junkie’s head.” The last part should have stung more than it did, but instead Sherlock just felt a creeping shame up the back of his neck. It was a sensation he seemed doomed to experience in abundance. 

“My father said if I stayed clean it wouldn’t enter the discussion,” Sherlock said. “Although I ought to have told you the truth. And sooner.”

“Your father is probably an idiot, but he’s also the reason we got the Apis Stinger back online,” Gregson said. “And Sherlock? You should have told me. But not because I’m disappointed in you.” 

“In that case,” Sherlock said, and he scrubbed one hand down over his face, as if doing so would erase the flush he felt spreading there, “I shall endeavor to do better.” 

“That’s only part of what I’m going to ask of you,” Gregson said, a little fondly. “But it’s as good a start as any.”

 

 


End file.
